1. Field of the Description
The present invention relates, in general, to water or boat-based amusement park rides, and, more particularly, to boat ride systems that are configured to permit each boat to be selectively operated at variable speed. The ride systems may provide underwater control to manage or set boat-to-boat spacing and boat position along a ride's path (e.g., along a length of a waterway or channel) to enhance display of a synchronized show to the ride's passengers. The ride systems may also be adapted to allow selective control and changing of the orientation of the boat relative to the direction of travel such as to turn a boat such that it faces to the left or right (and move the boat sideways along the ride path) or even to cause the boat to face backwards (and move the boat backwards along the ride path).
2. Relevant Background
Amusement parks continue to be popular worldwide with hundreds of millions of people visiting the parks each year. Park operators often seek new designs for rides, and it is often desirable that each ride incorporates a slower portion or segment to their rides to allow them to provide a “show” in which animation, movies, three-dimensional (3D) effects and displays, audio, and other effects are presented as vehicles proceed through such show portions. The show portions of rides are often run or started upon sensing the presence of a vehicle and are typically designed to be most effective when the vehicle travels through the show portion at a particular speed (e.g., the exact position of the vehicle is known along the ride's path).
Boat or water rides with floating vehicles are popular with park visitors especially during hotter seasons, and boat rides typically are designed to simulate movement of a floating boat such as a drifting raft or motorized craft. A common boat ride may include boats that each have guide wheels provided on sides of the boat, e.g., out of sight below the level of the water, to contact sides of a water channel or trough. Additional, wheels may be provided on the bottoms of the boats to roll the boat on ramped bottom surfaces of the trough. Each boat is moved forward along the length of the trough by propelling a volume of water down the trough in the desired direction of travel. The trough may be sloped to provide a gravity flow of the water and/or pumps may be provided to move water in flat or less sloped portions of the trough.
Use of flowing water is a proven and simple type of propulsion, but a number of limitations with boat rides have limited creation of new designs and integration of complex, synchronized show elements within boat rides. First, the boats are typically limited in their travel such that they only face forward or randomly twirl around in some river raft rides. This characteristic of boat rides creates limitations on controlling passenger sight lines, which can make it difficult to effectively present show elements to the passengers in comparison to dry ride systems where a vehicle can be controlled to face in any direction along a track.
Second, the boats may each travel at differing speeds such as varying within the range of 2 to 4 feet per second. This wide variance in speed may be caused by the boats being loaded differently such as with differing numbers and sizes of passengers. The varying loads results in heavier boats traveling faster than the more lightly loaded boats as the water flow rate varies within a channel (e.g., is faster at particular depth that may not be reached (or to a lesser amount) by lighter boats). This creates unequal spacing of the boats (e.g., varying boat-to-boat spacing) as the faster boats catch up with the slower boats or leave the slower boats far behind. In high capacity rides, boats are dispatched relatively close together, and the natural variation in boat speeds causes the boats to clump together or spread apart, both results typically being undesired by the ride operators. Testing has shown that equally loaded boats may experience speed variances of up to 3 percent while unequally loaded boats may experience speed variances of up to 9 percent. Boat rides with unpredictable and varying boat speeds (and, hence, unknown positions) has blocked such attractions from having timed or triggered individual show scenes.
Boat rides can be designed to account for varying speed, but these rides have limited appeal to many amusement park operators. For example, varying boat speeds may be accounted for by providing an elaborate, and complex method of sorting boats based on their loading (and, hence, expected travel speeds in the flowing water in the trough) upstream of a show scene portion of a ride. Positive methods for sorting boats are typically mechanical, but these mechanical sorting arrangements tend to undesirably interrupt the “free floating” feel and pace of the boat ride. In some boat rides, a moving cable is provided within the trough, and each boat is tethered to the cable so that it is propelled by being pulled along with the cable instead of by moving water. Such towing cable rides are useful in some applications, but these rides are generally limited to a single boat speed, to flat or non sloped configurations to avoid boat collisions, and to a forward-facing boat orientation a single passenger sight line).
Hence, there remains a need for improved boat rides for use in amusement parks. Preferably, a boat ride system could be provided that provides better control over the speed, position, and orientation of each boat along the ride's travel path so as to allow show scenes to be better synchronized to boat movements through the ride and to provide a new and different ride experience, for passengers compared to existing rides using flowing water to propel boats.